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20080909-beltway-believers-by-laura-bramon-goodMy housemates and I have been getting our nightly fix of the Democratic and Republican conventions via old-school radio. As we cook, read and tend children, proclamations echo through our cavernous old house like the din of some semi-distant calamity. The weather has been unseasonably cool here in Washington, DC, and all of our house’s tall windows are thrown open to the wet breeze. So when we walk down to the mailbox, the commentary trails us. When we go out to the garden to gather late-August tomatoes, it keeps apace. When we sit down to dinner, it doesn’t even catch its breath, and finally, we all look up at each other, roll our eyes, and nominate someone to cut it off so we can pray and eat in peace.

The dining room table in our urban commune hosts four adults: one who grew up the son of conservative medical missionaries, one whose apolitical mother became a Republican only to infuriate an annoying local Dem, one whose family prided itself on membership among the Liberal intelligentsia, and one whose pro-choice Southern Baptist parents forged a split Democrat-Republican marriage.

The only thing our political histories have in common is that we arrived in DC during the early days of the George W. Bush administration. Fresh out of college, we came less for presidential politics and more for the wide-ranging opportunities of a big city. It was only a matter of time before we were initiated into the chummy triumphalism of Republican Evangelicals.

We housemates first met at The Falls Church, an Evangelical bastion that the press loves to knock as a haven for hobnobbing neocons. And let’s be honest: it was. Alberto Gonzales became a regular, White House staffers filled the pews, and everybody who was anybody claimed ties to the Fellowship and Doug Coe.

Even someone like me, the politically unconnected, conflicted daughter of the pro-choice Southern Baptists – who chose The Falls Church less for its pedigree and more for a young, progressive preacher and the church’s healing prayer ministries – ended up running in the same circles as the twentysomethings profiled in Jeff Sharlet’s 2003 Harper’s piece, “Jesus Plus Nothing“.

It was a time when it was very easy to be a Christian and a Republican.

Because of my parents’ political conflicts, which fed my own, I was reticent to embrace the spirit of the times. But I did not explicitly reject it. In a city that thrives on partisanship, I tried to muddle my way to a middle ground: by laughing noncommittally at political jokes and occasionally making much of my family’s support for Planned Parenthood. But the first night I met with a church small group, the leader bragged about his friend’s recent engagement to the daughter of Ken Starr. When I tried to get a gig on the Hill, my only viable connections were the staffers of Southern gentlemen famous for laughing off global warming. And boys over whom I mooned, too conservative to date a girl who didn’t wear pearls, made me think twice about what I wore and who I was.

In the end, sins of omission set me among the bright young things whose herd blessed the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay. It was only in moving away from DC for several years—first to Montana, and then to Seattle—that I realized how thoroughly entwined religion, politics, and power had become for me, and how high Republican egotism had helped raise the bar of general political arrogance.

For these reasons and others, my housemates and I now number among refugees of the Bush II administration. The true believers have jumped ship, gone the way of Monica Goodling and her Regent University cronies, or are faithfully fulfilling their waning political appointments. To be fair, I now work for a federal agency and I have been impressed with the integrity and leadership of the Bush appointees in our office. For several of them, I know that their professionalism is possible because of spiritual disciplines of daily Mass, fervent prayer, and even membership at The Falls Church. Still, even among the party faithful, it is difficult to find people who talk the talk of eight years ago.

I often ask myself why so many former Bush II believers, accidental or otherwise, have been slow to embrace either party’s candidate in the 2008 presidential election. It’s a question whose constant counterpoint is the matter of why Evangelical voters just five years or so our junior embrace Obama wholeheartedly. Regarding the latter question, I don’t think it’s just the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, or the obnoxious Bush twins that have inspired so many twentysomethings to rethink the Republican religion of their childhoods. Listening to the political musings of young friends and former students, it seems to me that some of them have not abandoned, so much as swapped, political allegiance, substituting one Messiah for another.

Perhaps Messiah fatigue is the most accurate term for what afflicts us refugees: people disillusioned by a Republican demi-god, then disappointed in the 2008 Democratic primary by attempts to bait our votes via the alt-religions of gender and race. Certainly, we will not disengage in the Presidential contest, and undoubtedly, we will be at the polls in November. Whether or not we’ll be sporting the t-shirts and bumper stickers of the faithful elect remains to be seen.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Laura Bramon Good

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